Just to keep you informed: I'm currently working on a searchengine replacement. It works pretty well so far even if it's still lacking some features. Expect a public beta test soon. I'll need your help testing it then._________________"To have a successful open source project, you need to be at least somewhat successful at getting along with people." -- Daniel Robbins

Just to keep you informed: I'm currently working on a searchengine replacement. It works pretty well so far even if it's still lacking some features. Expect a public beta test soon. I'll need your help testing it then.

Fantastic, please keep us updated. The current search is 100% worthless, since you can't search for phrases, and since it throws out half of your search terms.

Earlier, someone said that the hardware is not the limiting factor. But if the initial problem was that searching was bogging down the server, and therefore the stop-list was implemented to make the search useless so that people would stop using it so much, resulting in a more responsive server, then how is that not a hardware problem? Doesn't faster hardware result in a less bogged-down server?

The current search is 100% worthless, since you can't search for phrases, and since it throws out half of your search terms.

It isn't great, but its far from 100% worthless. I find most of what I look for.

OK, 100% worthless is an exaggeration, but not by much. I find what I'm looking for on *maybe* 1 out of every 6 or 7 searches on here, and even then it's only by digging through piles of unrelated crap in the results. That is in stark contrast with say a Google search, in which not only do I virtually always find what I'm looking for, it's almost always one of the first 2 or 3 results. And it's not because Google has mad Jedi skills (though they obviously do), it's because they let me search for exactly what I need to search for.

So much of computer troubleshooting involves searching for either exact phrases (error messages), or a relatively obscure word *together* with a relatively common word (f.e. torsmo configuration). This forum makes both of those impossible, and as such, its uselessness approaches 100%.

The current search is 100% worthless, since you can't search for phrases, and since it throws out half of your search terms.

It isn't great, but its far from 100% worthless. I find most of what I look for.

OK, 100% worthless is an exaggeration, but not by much.

I tend to agree, although the exact percentage is depending on how you formulate your searches, but I would evaluate that to be at least 50% less efficient than what it used to be. Searching with error messages now mostly yields irrelevent results as before it would be a nearly equivalent to the Google's "I feel Lucky" button.

The point is, the stop word list is purely random. I posted here a phrase that is composed exclusively of stop words that were part of the list at the time I wrote it, meaning that this post will never appear in search results. I'm not sure, but I tend to think the phrase is not completely denuded of sens, thus prooving how this method randomly eleminating words from searches can severely hindered the results._________________(7 of 9) Installing star-trek/species-8.4.7.2::talax.

I searched for 'Google Earth' and none of the results were related, and the all important thread titled 'Google Earth' was ommitted. I only found what I was looking for after starting a new thread and having a mod tag mine to the end of an existing one.

I searched for 'Google Earth' and none of the results were related, and the all important thread titled 'Google Earth' was ommitted.

Off the Wall is not included in default searches, you have to search it specifically._________________Please read our FAQ Forum, it answers many of your questions.
irc: #gentoo-forums on irc.freenode.net

To paraphrase Beavis and Butthead, the stock search engine sucks worse than anything that has ever sucked before.

An improvement to the search engine would make the forums far, far more usable. It's a necessity at this point - I think there are a lot of duplicate topics posted because nobody can find the original ones.

Here are a few things I know of that would make the search engine more useful (or at least less useless). Most of these have been mentioned by others, I'm sure, but what the hell:

- ability to search titles ONLY (not message text)
- search for phrases in quotes
- a usable NOT operator to exclude words/phrases
- grouping symbols
- better results sorting (i.e. results in titles before results in bodies, etc)
- etc._________________"Give a man a fire and he's warm for one night, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life..."

Just to keep you informed: I'm currently working on a searchengine replacement. It works pretty well so far even if it's still lacking some features. Expect a public beta test soon. I'll need your help testing it then.

Just to keep you informed: I'm currently working on a searchengine replacement. It works pretty well so far even if it's still lacking some features. Expect a public beta test soon. I'll need your help testing it then.

I do not know what the features will be, so maybe you already included the following sugestion:

Option to exclude the <code></code> sections in the search.

This will make search for use flags much better! Also searches for kernel options. etc.

Yea, I understand the mysql database is obese with the stopwords...but seriously the searches without them SUCK. Every time i go to do a search for something like "software raid installation" only raid comes up...yea ok so I want every freakin post that has the word RAID in it...NOT. Try it, you'll see what I mean. See how long it takes you to find a thread about software raid installation.

The forums are useless without the ability to have a lot of these stopwords...I run into it every time I go to do a search. I hate the forums and the "friendly" and "usefull" community that was the Gentoo forums is now the freakin PITA search through the waste of search returns and MAYBE i'll find something relevant to what i was looking for.

About the only time I find the forums usefull is if I have a specific hardware device name or a specific package. The general ideas and posts that used to make life so easy are gone.

Search isn't that bad. I've have minor problems that aren't common, and manage to find similar problems to figure out a solution. I find the forums more helpful in that regard than Google._________________lolgov. 'cause where we're going, you don't have civil liberties.

I've also been very very frustrated many times at the seemingly totally stupid search. I wondered why the hell I'm getting pages and pages of completely irrelevant stuff which do not contain all the words I searched for, now I finally know why. I really freaked out when I saw things like error, compile, build, etc. in the stoplist. I hope the people saying "frequent ==> useless" here are not still believing that, because thats really stupid thinking, sorry. "mplayer compile error" is NOTHING less useless than "mplayer", quite the opposite, leaving just "mplayer" in the search and NOT EVEN GODDAMN TELLING YOU THAT FACT is like selling empty boxes of chocolate as full ones!

It's been 3-4 months now since Ian said he was working on something and would test it soon, how is that coming along?

Until then, how about a short notice at the top of the search results page, saying "please note we're ignoring half of your search words, (read why <link to this thread>), you might want to use <url to google site search query> instead" ? That sure would have saved me lots of time and frustration...

Please remember, it's mainly people new to Gentoo that use these forums most. Not people who have already read all th posts and know exactly how the search engine doesnt work.

Another thing that sucks about the search is that it doesnt direct you to which page the result was found on. I just tried searching for "gccmakedep" and it appears on several 20+ page threads, but now I have to go through page by page and do a text search on each one

I do care, it sucks big time. It is very hard to get relevant results because of stopwords lists. And this leads sometimes to more searches - quite counter productive. I also hate that I can't search the message titles which would give more relevant hits. Is that a feature of phpBB?

arnolde wrote:

Another thing that sucks about the search is that it doesnt direct you to which page the result was found on. I just tried searching for "gccmakedep" and it appears on several 20+ page threads, but now I have to go through page by page and do a text search on each one

You can do that. Just use the "Search" link and choose "Display results as: Posts". Quick Search doesn't provide this function, AFAIK.

We do care, but we just don't care to reply every time someone mentions again that the search function sucks. We are very aware of this fact as you can see from this thread and we all are eagerly awaiting the improvements ian! is working on. However everyone's time is limited, and so is ian's. Please remember none of us is able to work on the forums full time (unless someone volunteers to pay us for it )._________________Dinosaur week! (Ok, this thread is so last week)

Of course I understand you cant just sit right down and write a whole new search engine. But I think I made a valid point about a comment warning that the search might not produce the expected results, and what else to try, see 3 posts up. That shouldnt take too long to do, and would save new readers hours of frustration every day.

Not everyone reads the "read this first" part when they just want to search for the solution to one specific problem. (I daresay hardly anyone, but I'm not sure )

I know the feeling, when you know the answers and lotsa people dont, it's easy to sit back and say "well, they didnt read the instructions, so its their own fault"... But sometimes I also try to remember how it was when I was new and what would have made it a lot easier...